I have just had some great news 😄 I’m talking crying-with-happiness good news.
Two weeks ago we attempted to harvest my stem cells and it was a very disappointing fail. We did everything right; injections to mobilise them from my bone marrow into my blood (and the excruciating bone pain that the injections cause – imagine that your whole skeleton is throbbing on every heartbeat 😬😖) but for no apparent reason it just didn’t work. It was really difficult to not be disheartened and I was convinced that there was no reason why it would suddenly work if tried again, but they wanted to anyway.
I’m back in hospital (again). I had a whole 3 days at home where we planned and then booked a very last minute trip to Bournemouth (which I subsequently missed 😑). Turns out this bastard of a cold is something called Respiratory Syncytial Virus and even though they know that it’s almost completely certain that that’s all that I have currently, I have to stay in and on antibiotics anyway just so we don’t risk my precious stem cells being disregarded due to contamination with something bacterial.
Three days ago I started the daily G-CSF injections again (double the normal dose, ouch) and today they did the special blood test to see if it has worked and it has!!! I just got the great news. So tomorrow I get to experience the wonders of modern medicine as my blood will be taken out of my body (not all at once), spun and filtered to removed those glorious stem cells and then put back into me. Let me say, it’s something I thought I’d ever be excited about but I bloody am!